Why Our Evangelism Stopped Working in the Secular West
There's a scene in Ted Lasso Season 3 that made me pause the entire episode and turn to my wife with that mission-nerd look in my eyes.
One of the older characters — Higgins — tells a riddle to a group of women.
A father and his son are in a terrible car accident. The father dies at the scene, and the son is rushed to the hospital. The surgeon looks at the boy and says, "I can't operate on him. He's my son."
“How is that possible?” Higgins asks.
For decades this riddle stopped people cold. They'd sit there turning it over, running through increasingly elaborate explanations — twins, stepfathers, adoption — before finally landing on the answer that had been sitting in plain sight the whole time.
The surgeon is the boy's mother.
The riddle exposed something uncomfortable. A blind spot baked so deep into how people saw the world that they couldn't see it at all. The assumption that surgeons are always men. And when the answer landed it exposed that uncomfortable assumption. The riddle hit hard.
But here's what happens in the Ted Lasso scene:
Higgins tells the riddle to a group of women — many of whom are younger. And no sooner has he asked, “how is that possible?” than they start calling out answers.
"Because she's a woman."
"She's gay."
"Sperm donor."
"He lives in a simulation?"
Higgins stands there, a bit shocked. Then says: "Right. Yeah, I guess that's a bit dated now."
That exchange is one of the most precise illustrations of the missional challenge facing the church today.
The younger women weren't being dismissive. They engaged immediately. But the friction point the riddle was built around — the assumption that surgeons must be male — didn't exist for them. Their world already contains a far wider range of possibilities for what a family looks like, who holds professional roles, how identity works. The riddle assumed a limitation they don't have.
This is the situation the church is in with the emerging secular generations most of us are trying to reach. To people who grew up outside the church entirely, who have no religious framework, who are navigating life with a completely different set of assumptions about reality — we keep telling them the dated riddle.
We build our evangelism around friction points that no longer exist for them. We assume they are wrestling with questions they have never asked. We construct our presentations to resolve tensions they have never felt. And then we stand there confused when it doesn't land, wondering if they just aren't interested.
They were interested. They just live in a different world than the one our approach was built for. A world that is wider than our traditional theological answers were designed for. A world where the range of what's possible has expanded significantly. And the tools we designed have stopped working — not because the tools were badly made, but because the world they were designed for is no longer the world people inhabit.
The solution is not to get frustrated with emerging generations for not responding to our approach. They're not the problem. Their expanded imagination is not a deficiency.
The solution is to understand how they think. To ask — before we open our mouths — what are the live conversations in this person's life? What friction points do they actually feel? What questions are they genuinely carrying?
Because the gospel is not dated. The story of a God who made us for love, who refuses the separation, who entered the suffering rather than hovering above it — that story is as urgent as it has ever been.
But the way we tell it has to take its shape from the person listening. That was Jesus. He didn't have one framework he applied to everyone. He read the room. He found the live conversation already happening in the person in front of him and entered it. Born again for Nicodemus. Living water for the woman at the well. Bread of life for the hungry crowd.
Same truth. Different on-ramp every time.
If this kind of conversation interests you — how do we take the truths we carry and communicate them in ways that actually connect with the secular, post-church world — this is exactly what we work through together inside the Mission Collective.
Every Sunday we gather live to think through these questions together. How do we reach people who don't share our framework? How do we make doctrines like the Investigative Judgment or the state of the dead meaningful to someone who has never opened a Bible? What does cultural fluency actually look like in practice?
When you join the Mission Collective you get every TSCP digital resource — every ebook, every workshop — in one library for one low monthly price. And you get to be in the room for these live conversations.
More members means more time I can spend building resources like this. So joining is both an investment in your own ministry and a direct contribution to the work continuing.
If that vision resonates with you, the door is open.
